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On July 15, 2021, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced more than $3 million in grants to 40 sites and organizations through its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Over the past four years, the National Trust has funded 105 historic places connected to Black history and invested more than $7.3 million to help preserve landscapes and buildings imbued with Black life, humanity, and cultural heritage. — National Trust for Historic Preservation
Grants were awarded across four categories: capacity building, project planning, capital, and programming and interpretation. Grantees include the Oakland Public Library, City of Sacramento, Indiana Landmarks, African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, Save Harlem Now!, and... View full entry
The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has been awarded a $20 million grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in an unprecedented move that will nearly double the amount of funding the organization has received since its inception in... View full entry
Charles I. Cassell, a distinguished architect who helped shape the campus of the University of the District of Columbia and fierce advocate of Washington D.C. statehood, passed away on May 17th, the Washington Post reports. He was 96. According to his wife, Linda Wernick-Cassell, the cause of... View full entry
Here at Archinect, we highlight academic events and lectures that provide insight and access to public programming created by architecture schools. Year after year, these events welcome various leaders and innovators within architecture, design, and its adjacent fields of study. While in-person... View full entry
Princeton University Press (PUP) has announced plans to publish If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond., Jr., a forthcoming biography on the pivotal 20th century architect written by architectural historian Brian D. Goldstein. A PUP announcement explains... View full entry
Laura Blokker, interim director of the Tulane University School of Architecture's Preservation Studies program, and Andrew Liles, assistant professor of architecture at the school, have won the Richard L. Blinder Award, a $15,000 grant from the Trustees of the James Marston Fitch... View full entry
While much attention has been paid this summer to the removal of racist monuments to the confederacy, America's legacy of historic plantations continues on as a lucrative, popular, and deeply controversial industry. A transformation has been taking place within some of the organizations and... View full entry
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, The JPB Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund, and The Executive Leadership Council are collaborating on a $1 million pilot project that aims to develop conservation and... View full entry
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. has been named in honor of Mary W. Jackson, the first female African American engineer to work at the American space agency. A NASA announcement explains that Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace engineer... View full entry
Since 2012, Hill has surveyed hundreds of structures that she believes once served as a home to enslaved African Americans. More often than not, the buildings bear no visible trace of their past; many have been converted into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cases the structures have fallen into ruin or vanished entirely, leaving behind a depression in the ground. — Atlas Obscura
Writing in Atlas Obscura, writer Sabrina Imbler takes an in-depth look at the work of Jobie Hill, the Iowa City architect who started Saving Slave Houses, a project that aims to catalog, document, and ultimately preserve the remaining "living and working environments of enslaved people" in... View full entry
The latest installment of The New York Times' 1619 Project takes a look at the largely erased built legacy of slavery in America. The article visits a collection of sites that had to be uncovered more or less through original research, as little documentation and few historical markers... View full entry
Since its founding, the National Register of Historic Places has helped to generate an estimated two million jobs and more than a hundred billion dollars in private investments. But, because many biases were written into the criteria that determine how sites are selected, those benefits have gone mostly to white Americans. One of the criteria for preservation is architectural significance, meaning that modest buildings like slave cabins and tenement houses were long excluded from consideration. — The New Yorker
Writing in The New Yorker, Casey Cep profiles Brent Leggs, director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The lengthy, eye-opening report delves into the work of preservationists like Leggs who are fighting to uncover... View full entry
The Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery, which sits in northeast Houston behind roads peppered with concrete plants and trucking depots, is just one of thousands of eroding African-American cemeteries across the state, in danger of being erased as descendants of those buried have died out, moved out or been pushed out. Many of the cemeteries are long gone. For years, mainstream historians didn’t pay attention to them; now genealogists, historians and families are rushing to save them. — Houston Chronicle
The Houston Chronicle takes a look at the growing movement to rediscover and preserve the forgotten African American burial grounds of Texas by highlighting the story of the Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery. The push to save and memorialize African American cemeteries is part of a larger... View full entry
Alongside a wider effort to uncover and rediscover the lost and forgotten histories of historically marginalized groups and populations, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia has recently taken steps to uncover the 18th century living-history museum's queer legacies. In a recent... View full entry
The National Trust and its partners have led advocacy efforts to increase funding for five competitive grant programs: the African American Civil Rights Grant Program, the Underrepresented Community Grant Program, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Grant Program, Save America’s Treasures, and the Historic Revitalization Subgrant Program. In total, these competitive grant programs received $41 million in FY 2019. — Saving Places
The National Trust for Historic Preservation breaks down some of the recently expanded funding opportunities that have taken shape at the federal level earmarked for the preservation of diverse and inclusive built heritage. Highlighted programs include the African American Civil Rights... View full entry
